Activism, affect, identification: trans documentary in France and Spain and its reception

Abstract

This article explores the documentation of trans activism in France and Spain since the 2000s. The first part addresses questions surrounding the place of affect and narrative in documentary film, particularly in relation to trans issues. The second part of the article analyses an audience case study from a screening at the International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Barcelona of Valérie Mitteaux's Girl or Boy, My Sex is not my Gender (2011), considering how different viewers respond to the representation of trans identities. The article builds on qualitative research whilst extending the exploration of sexuality and gender in previous audience studies to a consideration of documentary film, seeking to provide a more nuanced understanding of what audience claims for identification in politicised contexts mean.

Raised Fists: Politics, Technology, and Embodiment in 1970s French Feminist Video Collectives

“…Hocquenghem's notion of "trans-sexualité" seems to have little to do with transsexuality or transgender politics and identity, according to which these words potentially pose a problem that highlights the well-documented tensions between transsexual and queer politics (which do not fall into the remit of this article but I have explored elsewhere). 13 Rather, it appears as a term specific to his understanding of sexuality (rather than identity) as a slippery, non-hierarchical, or, to use Deleuze and Guattari's terminology, rhizomatic and essentially communicative force that refuses to distinguish between subject and object, active and passive, or masculine and feminine.…”